HN Books @HNBooksMonth

A very-related classic reading on this is a short-and-sweet

"How to Lie With Statistics"

https://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/03...

It's always best to use the maximum possible precision. This way people know they can trust your data.

Round numbers would lead people to believe you were just making things up.

Source:

How to Lie with Statistics, Darrell Huff and Irving Geis

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393310728/

How to Lie with Statistics is a classic on this:

https://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/03...

⬐ sideshowb

Also "how to lie with maps".

⬐ wuch

Sadly this book gets the description of statistical significance completely wrong. Not particularly surprising, given how unintuitive reasoning behind p-values really is, in Jeffreys words: "What the use of P implies, therefore is that a hypothesis that may be rejected because it has not predicted observable results that have not occurred. This seems a remarkable procedure."

Statistics is not trusted because it shouldn't be. It is incredibly easy to lie with statistics. There's even a tutorial:

https://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/03...

Statistics is ultimately counting, and therefore is incredibly vulnerable to discretion in choosing "what counts". Take the unemployment rate as one example. When people realize that its not equivalent to "people who do not have a job", how can you complain that they trust statistics less?

Expert authority is in decline because it should be, as there is an increasing body of evidence that experts, from politics to medicine, have almost no advantage in forecasting power than the average person.

https://www.amazon.com/Expert-Political-Judgment-Good-Know/d...

Why should "experts" (often just pundits) have any authority when they have consistently demonstrated they deserve very little?

Finally, the political slant of this article, going along with the decried "fake news", blaming the election results on these declines in authority, is pathetic. It's basically an extension of "the other side is filled with stupids" and has no credibility, no matter how you dress it in professional journalistic veneer.

⬐ diego_moita

Everything you wrote would make sense if we had a good alternative to statistics and expertise. The only alternative is ignorance.

> there is an increasing body of evidence that experts

Is this "body of evidence" non-statistical?

⬐ zigzigzag

There are plenty of alternatives to statistics and expertise, as the sibling comment points out, letting people get on with things themselves (i.e. the default action of do nothing) is essentially a delegation to the wisdom of the crowds. Gut feeling and intuition are also alternatives people frequently rely on, and aren't necessarily nonsense: the brain is very good at synthesising conclusions at the level of the subconscious that surface consciously as hunches or gut feelings.

The "body of evidence" that self-proclaimed experts are frequently wrong is rarely presented statistically, but it could be so. However this would be circular, it'd be an expert using statistics to claim that experts using statistics can't be trusted. That's a time when 'common sense' knowledge is sufficient: if you've seen endless stories in the press about how experts predit X, and none about experts predicting not X, then when X doesn't happen you can safely lower your trust in experts without needing an Excel spreadsheet to prove it to yourself.

⬐ coolgeek

> Gut feeling and intuition are also alternatives people frequently rely on, and aren't necessarily nonsense: the brain is very good at synthesising conclusions at the level of the subconscious that surface consciously as hunches or gut feelings

And thus we get anti-vaxxers and climate change denial.

⬐ lliamander

> The only alternative is ignorance.

Sometimes ignorance isn't even an option: it's mandatory. The only choice we are left with is whether to admit to ourselves that we are ignorant.

The choice isn't between governing peoples lives using statistics vs. governing peoples lives based on gut-instinct (or whatever). It's between using weak statistics as a pretext for governing peoples lives vs. just admitting there's a lot we don't know and choosing to give people space to figure out things for themselves.

Jim Manzi, who literally built his business off of effective use of statistics, spent 10 years figuring out where to put the snickers bar at the checkout stand[0] and he admitted it was a really hard problem. Yet it's a joke compared to some issues that experts claim they can solve.

I have to depend upon statistical reasoning, both directly and indirectly, for work. I understand and appreciate the validity of the methods of statistics. That doesn't mean I'm going to trust any statistics that are used to back a policy proposal.

[0]http://www.weeklystandard.com/jim-manzi-talks-science-knowle...

⬐ mikeash

BLS is quite up-front about what the "unemployment rate" measures, and provides six different numbers using different definitions in order to better capture the big picture. I don't see why I can't complain if people's reaction to this information is to trust statistics less, rather than spend thirty seconds reading about where the numbers come from.

⬐ nkurz

One argument I've seen is that although BLS provides many metrics, they consciously avoid several useful metrics that paint a realistic but negative picture of the economy. If I understand it, one big complaint is that "long term discouraged workers" are dropped from U6, and BLS does not publish a metric showing total labor force participation. I don't know enough about the details to assess know if this is true, but I thought this piece seemed like an objective criticism: http://www.shadowstats.com/article/c810x.pdf

⬐ mikeash

That seems like a fair criticism. But at the same time, as long as they don't pretend that the numbers say more than they do, I don't see a big problem with them.

⬐ amalcon

Most people who have recently been to a pro baseball game know that there are times to mistrust statistics. The home team likes to give attending fans something to look at during the long periods of relative downtime. For each hitter who comes up, they like to come up with a statistic that favors the home team to display on the screens. There are lots of options, so they can take their pick, even if they sometimes come up with things like "At-bats on a Tuesday against teams out-of-division".

However, everyone who's trusted any technology that accounts for quantum effects (e.g. modern computer processors) has trusted statistics. Everyone who's ever received a modern medical treatment (of any kind) has trusted statistics.

The hard part is knowing when you should, and when you should not, trust statistics. Frankly I don't think there's anyone who can do that 100% of the time -- but I think most people could probably learn to do well enough to benefit. The learning part is tough, though.

⬐ psyklic

Implying that most experts have agendas that supersede the truth is outrageous and frankly dangerous. Saying we should just give up on using data to make predictions is ludicrous -- even if it hasn't worked before in some situations.

We should hopefully be in agreement that using data to make decisions is preferred to winging it. We should also hopefully be in agreement that we should trust people who devote their life to studying an issue over someone new who merely has gut feelings about it -- and hence is even more biased in many additional ways.

The thrust of your argument is valid -- summarizing data inherently leaves things out. However, the solution to this is not to give up and throw statistics out the window. And the solution is definitely not to unfairly discredit people who devote their lives to these issues.

Rather, if you see statistics, wonder how they were generated and why some data was included and others thrown out. By being open and candid about the decisions made, the statistics are meaningful. Just giving numbers without providing details of how they were achieved is not valid statistical work.

From my experience, most scientists (and myself in my work) care about the truth over everything else. I use statistics to better understand my data. My objective is always to choose the most sensible path in analyzing it that allows me to most accurately answer the questions I pose.

⬐ engi_nerd

> Implying that most experts have agendas that supersede the truth is outrageous and frankly dangerous.

I think that "experts with agendas that supersede the truth" claim is true if you consider the pool of pundits that regularly appear in mainstream media. Unfortunately they are not representative of scientists like yourself.

⬐ conistonwater

Even then the claim is not true, because then you would be wrong to call them "experts". The fault then lies not with the experts, but with the media you choose to watch.

⬐ gwenzek

Well most people don't do a complete study before choosing a media. They usually just turn on TV. I think that major media companies should be more responsible of what they say. Or how do it correlate to the life of people (like for the GDP).

⬐ engi_nerd

It would be wrong by our standards to call them "experts", but that won't stop the media from using the term.

Personally I avoid news as much as possible, but it's almost impossible to avoid it totally (break rooms, visits to friends homes, etc mean that I still see a bit of mainstream news media).

⬐ psyklic

This attitude of not trusting experts and not trusting statistics unfortunately permeates from the political arena into science.

The belief that all statistics are not to be trusted is a clear danger to our society. Not trusting climate scientists. Not even trusting simple statistics on vaccinations. As another poster noted, the only alternative is ignorance.

⬐ engi_nerd

I agree with you.

⬐ vanattab

Exactly. So what we need to do is reduce the misuse and cherry picking in the statistics that make it to the main stream media (both sides) so that public confidence in science does not degrade further.

⬐ Jill_the_Pill

"most experts have agendas that supersede the truth"

I spend a lot of time with education statistics, and this is absolutely commonplace. Most of it is spin; folks choose the metrics that support the point they want to make.

⬐ calpaterson

> We should also hopefully be in agreement that we should trust people who devote their life to studying an issue over someone new who merely has gut feelings about it -- and hence is even more biased in many additional ways.

Unfortunately this is sometimes untrue. For example: Long Term Capital Management was run by some of the most expert academic financiers perhaps ever gathered together and it blew up. Lord Kelvin thought X-Rays were a hoax. It is the blanket assumption that specialists in a field should be trusted that is mistake. Specialism has an important place but epistemology is a difficult subject and it is a matter for everyone.

⬐ psyklic

It's all about who to trust. Science sometimes gets it wrong for a while, as do some scientists. However, I would trust expert academic financiers over someone who by luck happened to have a good year with his or her stock picks.

⬐ coolgeek

Also, experts - as a class - are vastly more likely to change their minds based on new evidence than are ideologues.

"When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?"

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Keynes

⬐ Chris2048

> Implying that most experts have agendas that supersede the truth is outrageous and frankly dangerous

Are you talking about actual experts, or claimed experts? The issue here is the high number of the latter indistinguishable from the former.

> Saying we should just give up on using data to make predictions is ludicrous

Who is "we". Statistics can still be performed, but it's unrestricted "authority" must be examined - it's too easy to do "bad" or "not" statistics, and claim it to be valid without restriction. It's also easy and common to use misleading statistics too, so simply outlawing bad statistics isn't enough - there need to be clear guidelines on non-ambiguity, much like exists for legal documents.

> I use statistics to better understand my data

You don't benefit from statistics half as much as those that use it to gain political power.

⬐ mjfl

> We should also hopefully be in agreement that we should trust people who devote their life to studying an issue over someone new who merely has gut feelings about it -- and hence is even more biased in many additional ways.

I have to admit that I don't trust social scientists with anything they say about social science. There have been too many replication failures. I don't think you are entitled to people's deference just because you spend your life doing something, there has to be something more "material" than that. If I spent my life trying to get a girlfriend would you go to me for dating advice?

Physics is one thing - you can easily demonstrate the atomic model is correct by building a nuclear fission generator. Computer Science is pretty objective, math.. But almost any other field my reaction is - "okay, well show me, use it". I'm not in the wrong there, you're in the wrong for not effectively proving it to me. Our default should be skepticism.

Sure but what if it was never a fact. 'Fat makes you fat' or similar falsification that have real impact to society[0]

We shouldn't attribute everything to malice, but there are clear issues in science:

'Too many of the findings that fill the academic either are the result of shoddy experiments or poor analysis

Last year researchers at one biotech firm, Amgen, found they could reproduce just six of 53 “landmark” studies in cancer research. Earlier, a group at Bayer, a drug company, managed to repeat just a quarter of 67 similarly important papers. A leading computer scientist frets that three-quarters of papers in his subfield are bunk. In 2000-10 roughly 80,000 patients took part in clinical trials based on research that was later retracted because of mistakes or improprieties.

Careerism also encourages exaggeration and the cherry-picking of results. In order to safeguard their exclusivity, the leading journals impose high rejection rates: in excess of 90% of submitted manuscripts. The most striking findings have the greatest chance of making it onto the page.

Conversely, failures to prove a hypothesis are rarely even offered for publication, let alone accepted. “Negative results” now account for only 14% of published papers, down from 30% in 1990. Yet knowing what is false is as important to science as knowing what is true. The failure to report failures means that researchers waste money and effort exploring blind alleys already investigated by other scientists.'[1]

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Salt-Sugar-Fat-Giants-Hooked/dp/08129... [1] http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21588069-scientific-re...

[2] Alan Sokal - Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Hoax-Science-Philosophy-Cultur... [3] How to Lie with Statistics - https://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/03... [4] Nassim Taleb 'Incerto', twitter.com/nntaleb

⬐ splawn

Despite all of your examples, science is still the best way we have for understanding the universe. If you have a better way then by all means enlighten us.

⬐ Chris2048

OP posts about the current state of science, A better way of doing science is needed.

⬐ 551199

Exactly, we could do some much better. Religious attitude is really hurting science.

⬐ splawn

Sure, there will always be room for improvement. However, I disagree with your latter point, putting ignorant, anti-science, religious, magical thinking people into power is really hurting science. Unlike religion, philosophically, Science is always open for improvement.

Edit: I had a comma party.

⬐ 551199

Repeat of study should be the bare minimum. We are in a situation where lot of underlining assumptions are false. It's hard for common people to experiment science but lets examine something that everybody can experiment daily. Nutritional science. It turns out most of the findings are complete bs or paid by special interests. Probably its not as bad elsewhere but faces similar issues presented in The Economist article.

Unfortunately, sites like snopes and politifact also succumb to the same type of bias as the right-wing sites. See this article where politifact was handed propaganda material from the Clinton foundation and parroted it without doing any actual checking about AIDS drugs the Clinton foundation was funding:

http://www.politifactbias.com/2016/11/the-daily-caller-polit...

The problem is a lack of education by the consumer. I suggest everyone read this book as an intro on the topic:

https://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/03...

Everyone has an agenda, follow the money, and trust no one. Whether it's right-wing like Alex Jones or Left-wing like the Tampa Bay Times a.k.a politifact, you need to be suspicious and do your own research if you want the truth.

I highly recommend reading "How to Lie with Statistics"[0]. Old but still very relevant.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/039...

⬐ hvass

I highly recommend it as well! There are amazing examples in the book. And if you look around, you should be able to find presentations on it online. (filetype:pdf / ppt in Google).

⬐ bashcoder

Haha - we posted the same link, so I will +1 yours instead. This article is very much in keeping with the spirit of that book. A friend kindly gave me a first edition from 1954.

⬐ sillysaurus3

I came here to say the same thing. Also http://www.statisticsdonewrong.com/

How does 365 data points give your conclusions any sort of statistical significance? Snapchat's numbers are allegedly over 30M, Facebook's are over 1.2B and Instagram's are 150M.

I suggest reading "How to Lie with Statistics"[1]

[1] http://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/039...

Edit: I guess that sounded a little harsh. No doubt, Snapchat's growth has been explosive and if this was just another blog-spam post about that fact, I'd let it be. But you're selling a statistical software! I'd expect better from people who know what they're doing. Also, "How to Lie with Statistics" is a really good book, should be required reading for anyone dealing with numbers. Did not mean that as an attack on your product.

⬐ ckelly

Hi Nathan, Thanks for your comment. And no offense taken. :)

Most people are surprised how "few" respondents it takes to get to 5% margin of error at 95% confidence levels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margin_of_error#Different_conf...

In this case, .98/sqrt(365) = 5.1%

So, perhaps counterintuitively, 300-400 respondents gives good read on large populations (like Snapchat users...or the US population!).

⬐ tomato_sausage

Assuming the respondents are uniformly randomly chosen, it takes surprisingly few people to get a pretty high confidence interval. I'm not convinced that the respondents are uniform, but I expect that there is a sufficient distribution that the results are still interesting. 3x vs. 1.5x seems like a small difference to me, but I am not an investor or user, so....

⬐ michaelmior

Yes, this exactly. The assumption of uniform distribution is not one to be taken lightly.

⬐ lclarkmichalek

Gallup's daily tracking polls, which offer a +-4% margin of error, are based of 1000 data points (insert complaint about appeal to authority here). While 365 is significantly lower than that, there is nothing wrong with using the data to produce a value and a margin of error/confidence.

I like the story of the graph a lot more than the graph itself.

The two things I would like to see are:

- Per capita debt per person who attended college. (Or perhaps who graduated college) This would answer an implied question of "What if we're just getting more people going to college?"

- The salary legend should start at 0. This would put the relative movement of salary in a more accurate context.

I don't think fixing these changes the story of "The long term cost of college is going up, while the short term benefits are going down." but when I see tricks out of "How to lie with Statistics"[1] my BS detector goes up.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/039...

>Yeah, so can lightning, bathtubs, and aspirin. The risk from vaccines is miniscule.

Unlike lightning, risk of harm from vaccines is preventable. One commenter mentioned the Polio vaccine earlier. The OPV does cause a small number of people to develop polio. The matter was paid attention to, OPV use was curtailed in favor of the other vaccine, the problem was solved. The reformulated vaccine retained its effectiveness without further incidences of Polio infection. If it happened today, I would expect people like you tell those first Polio vaccine victims to "Piss off!", "It's good enough!", "You're a fake!", "You have a 'genetic predisposition'" or other hand-waviness, "Adverse effects are rare.", "You probably already had Polio.", etc.

>even smoking marijuana, for that matter,

To paraphrase you [Citation_needed]

>Pretty much everything is more dangerous than vaccines,

Most people take various levels of precaution against those risks, yet many will just let anyone in a lab coat jab them without hesitation. Fine for them, fine for you, but don't expect me to fall in line without more information.

>Your kid is at more risk of SIDS than vaccine complications.

Which is why my kids have been vaccinated (with a subset of the vaccines recommended by the schedule). I just don't jump up out of my chair every time some drug company comes out with a new product to sell. Do you rail against people from countries who follow different vaccine schedules from the one in your country? http://vaccine-schedule.ecdc.europa.eu/Pages/Scheduler.aspx What do you think of the Japanese, who are relative "vaccine deniers"[2] yet somehow miraculously have the longest life expectancy anywhere on the planet?[3]

> a number of class-action lawsuits were filed against GlaxoSmithKline

>In effect, your claim appears to be without basis.

Vaccine court doesn't protect companies when they knowingly or maliciously harm people, my mistake.

>absurd and damaging to society.

What is absurd and damaging to society is the persistent obfuscation and non-disclosure of clinical trial data, and the failure to conduct proper non-rigged trials. The safety of drugs and medicine is important and it must be credible. There is widespread doubt (among people who pay attention) about the system that is supposed to ensure peoples' safety. Instead of addressing reasonable peoples' reasonable concerns, people such as yourself resort to rudeness, specious character attacks, and other fallacious tactics.

>The actual incidence of problems caused by vaccines is much lower than the incidence of problems incorrectly ascribed to vaccines.

Fact is, you don't know if that is true or not. You don't have any proof of it. You merely want it to be true that anyone who claims injury by a vaccine is a fraud, and a litigious cheat. [Citation needed, indeed.]

>re: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Citation_needed

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=CDC+Vaccine+Adverse+Event

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=NVIC note not a gov't org

Give Google a try, you'll get the hang of it.

see also: The Cochrane Collaboration http://www.cochrane.org/

> Vaccines are by and large rigorously tested before entering the marketplace.

If that were really true for the LYMErix vaccine, the trials would have revealed the large fraction of people[1] who were predisposed to adverse reaction. There are serious problems with drugs qualification testing in the US and EU. Why don't you go read Bad Pharma by Ben Goldacre. here is a preview. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKmxL8VYy0M

>Is ten thousand people not enough for you? ....

The statistics have to be credible. http://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/039...

And: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD004879... specifically: " The review showed that reliable evidence on influenza vaccines is thin but there is evidence of widespread manipulation of conclusions and spurious notoriety of the studies. "

>Consider the previous statement about failing to comprehend statistics.

If you believe, based on your statistical prowess that the current system of drug/vaccine certification trials will effectively prevent bad drugs/vaccines from reaching the marketplace, then it is you who has an inadequate grasp of statistics.

>Consider also that your statement is blatantly false:

Or consider that my recollection of the details was mistaken slightly. OPV use was curtailed after VAPP was discovered.

>That means that VAPP is one of the only things that is actually less likely to happen to you than a terrorist attack.

As long as you aren't a starving waif in some developing country (or a starving waif from the US). From the Wiki: In immunodeficient children, the risk of VAPP is almost 7,000 times higher

>I dunno, the existence of people who are willing to spread pseudo-"cautionary tales" based on misrepresented data who can make marketing the vaccine a largely fruitless endeavor seems like it very well might be enough to discourage even a benevolent nonprofit organization. I'm glad we don't have such people around here.

After reading that again, I kind of regret that I wasted any time at all responding to you. If you're the sort of person who thinks a pharmaceutical company makes a favorable comparison to a "benevolent nonprofit organization" then it seems unlikely that you and I will find common ground. You're rude, you're flamebaiting, you've mis-characterized my comments, and your snide innuendo is an offensive character attack.

[1] About one-third of the general population is HLA-DR4+ and risks contracting the arthritic condition when exposed to the vaccine, according to the complaint. The HLA-DR4+ trait is easily detected by a routine blood test; however, SmithKline never recommended that doctors screen for the trait before administering the vaccine, the lawsuit alleges. source: http://www2.lymenet.org/domino/news.nsf/UID/SBHVaccineSuitPR...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood_immunizations#Worldw...

[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...

⬐ scythe

>Unlike lightning, risk of harm from vaccines is preventable.

You can't be serious. Like, really, you cannot be serious. I provide three examples. You ignore the two [bathtubs, aspirin] that don't fit the pattern you want to make up (one for three isn't very good), where said pattern is "vaccines preventable, accidents not", and you further ignore that being struck by lightning is obviously preventable by, e.g., staying indoors, and while this isn't perfect the vast majority of lightning strikes do in fact occur outside. So your use of lightning is wrong, and it is yet insufficient to support the greater point you are making, which is also wrong.

>Most people take various levels of precaution against those risks, yet many will just let anyone in a lab coat jab them without hesitation. Fine for them, fine for you, but don't expect me to fall in line without more information.

Yeah, but wearing a helmet while riding a bicycle but not while riding a motorcycle is a clear sign of insanity, is it not? The level of concern ought to be at least somewhat proportionate to the risk, yet the degree to which certain people attend to the risks of vaccines is anything but commensurate with the level of attention given to the risks of poor diet, lifestyle, driving, sports, over-the-counter drugs, alcohol etc.

>What do you think of the Japanese, who are relative "vaccine deniers"[2] yet somehow miraculously have the longest life expectancy anywhere on the planet?[3]

The Japanese do not vaccinate for diseases which do not exist in Japan. They do, however, vaccinate for Japanese encephalitis, whereas the US does not -- guess why. Vaccine schedules in most countries are designed to attack the most prevalent diseases in that country; nowhere are they designed to provide lots of spurious vaccinations for profit.

>What is absurd and damaging to society is the persistent obfuscation and non-disclosure of clinical trial data, and the failure to conduct proper non-rigged trials.

Your allegations that trials are "rigged" is without basis. As I've explained below, your claims that the trials were "rigged" is a result of your failure to understand the effect size in question, that being the incidence of VAE linked to LYMErix. However, saying that clinical trials are "rigged" without any evidence therefor is absurd.

>There is widespread doubt (among people who pay attention) about the system that is supposed to ensure peoples' safety.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_words

>Vaccine court doesn't protect companies when they knowingly or maliciously harm people, my mistake.

Your "mistake" was posting this godawful response. You explicitly claimed that it does. I explicitly showed that it does not. Furthermore, you allege things which you have not shown -- "knowingly or maliciously harm people" -- there is no evidence of malice here on the part of GSK, and by the time HLA-DR4+ was properly identified, the vaccine was being withdrawn from the market.

It is indeed a good thing that these people are able to recover compensation from the government. It would be wrong to leave them out in the cold. It is a silly criticism that the rewards are paid by the government rather than the company, as the goal is to provide adequate care to people adversely affected by public health efforts, not to discourage the development of vaccines by private industry.

>Fact is, you don't know if that is true or not. You don't have any proof of it. You merely want it to be true that anyone who claims injury by a vaccine is a fraud, and a litigious cheat. [Citation needed, indeed.]

...okay. I do know that it's true. Unfortunately, it's difficult to find aggregated statistics on idiopathic autoimmune disorders.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0090122997...

>From the incidence data we estimate that 237,203 Americans will develop an autoimmune disease in 1996 and that approximately 1,186,015 new cases of these autoimmune diseases occur in the United States every 5 years.

Not everyone is at equal risk, of course. Diabetes, for example, is linked to obesity. But the incidence of these disorders is already 1 in 1300 annually. Let's... let's be liberal. Let's assume that for an ordinary person, it's five times lower -- 1 in 6500.

Oh, by the way. Women are predisposed to this danger arising from "nothing". I suggest a class-action lawsuit against the producers of nothing on behalf of women.

>If that were really true for the LYMErix vaccine, the trials would have revealed the large fraction of people[1] who were predisposed to adverse reaction. There are serious problems with drugs qualification testing in the US and EU. Why don't you go read Bad Pharma by Ben Goldacre. here is a preview. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKmxL8VYy0M*

Because I don't need any more of a headache than you've already given me. "Predisposed" in your post comes with some big* scare quotes: if we assume that all adverse events occur in HLA-DR4... well, let's look at the data.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X01...

66 serious events for 1,400,000 vaccinations, or a 1:21000 chance of serious adverse events. If all of those cases happen to the 1/3 of people who are "predisposed" to Lyme arthritis, their risk is really 1:7000, slightly lower than their 1:6500 risk caused by... nothing. And that's only for disorders arising in the same year as the vaccination.

And this very low incidence rate is exactly what we expect to see after a vaccine has passed a properly formulated clinical trial.

Yes, I'm fudging the numbers. But I'm fudging them in your favor. The conclusion is obvious: down with nothing.

>The statistics have to be credible. http://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/039...

If your argument consists of denying the conclusions of scientific studies outright without any further analysis, you're effectively making things up out of thin air. The study was correctly performed, as confirmed by the follow-up.

>http://lmgtfy.com/?q=CDC+Vaccine+Adverse+Event*

http://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/Activities/vaers.html

>Specifically, judgments about whether the vaccine was truly responsible for an adverse event cannot be made from VAERS reports.

So the CDC is here... to back me up. Did you even look at the Google results?

>Or consider that my recollection of the details was mistaken slightly. OPV use was curtailed after VAPP was discovered.

Again, if not blatantly false, at least utterly misleading. The NIH did conduct trials to determine the safest form of oral polio vaccine, roughly ten years after it was introduced, largely because there's nobody, including me, who wants to see people get sick from a vaccine or anything else for that matter. The implication that the government scrambled to reformulate the vaccine in response to adverse events is absurd, and the 1960 formulation, still imperfect, is in use today:

>Outbreaks of VAPP occurred independently in Belarus (1965–66), Canada (1966–68), Egypt (1983–1993), Hispaniola (2000–2001), Philippines (2001), Madagascar (2001–2002),[48] and in Haiti (2002), where political strife and poverty have interfered with vaccination efforts.[49] In 2006 an outbreak of vaccine-derived poliovirus occurred in China.[50] Cases have been reported from Cambodia (2005–2006), Myanmar (2006–2007), Iran (1995, 2005–2007), Syria, Kuwait and Egypt.[51] Since 2005, The World Health Organization has been tracking vaccine-caused polio in northern Nigeria caused by a mutation in live oral polio vaccines.

You do of course have to keep these numbers in perspective. VAPP remains rarer than terrorism.

>As long as you aren't a starving waif in some developing country (or a starving waif from the US). From the Wiki: In immunodeficient children, the risk of VAPP is almost 7,000 times higher

A gross misrepresentation of life in developing countries, of the meaning of the term "immunodeficiency", and the causes of immunodeficiency. Immunodeficiency essentially means that a child cannot be vaccinated, as the purpose of a vaccine is to stimulate the immune system. Immunodeficiencies other than AIDS are not widespread in the developing world, nor are they generally a result of malnutrition, but you are of course correct that it is improper to vaccinate an immunodeficient child with any vaccine, OPV or otherwise! Agammaglobulinemia is, I assure you, not caused by poor nutrition.

>If you're the sort of person who thinks a pharmaceutical company makes a favorable comparison to a "benevolent nonprofit organization"

If I can show that it is true for a benevolent entity, then it follows a fortiori for GSK. That was the point.

>I kind of regret that I wasted any time at all responding to you.

Although your post is almost entirely banal, I do not regret responding to you. The misinformation you attempt to spread is dangerous, and while you have every right to claim it, people have the collective right to be informed that your arguments are weak and your conclusions incorrect. It is in the interest of people reading this to see your claims debunked, and so I have attempted to do so in a clear and scientifically accurate manner.

My intent is not to find "common ground" with someone who does not read the links they post. My intent is to expose you.

⬐ fnordfnordfnord

You can't be serious. Like, really, you cannot be serious. I provide three examples. You ignore the two [bathtubs, aspirin]

Why not fifty? Then we can spend all our time quibbling about irrelevant analogies. BTW where's your pot-isn't-harmful rebuttal?

>The level of concern ought to be at least somewhat proportionate to the risk, yet the degree to which certain people attend to the risks of vaccines is anything but commensurate with the level of attention given to the risks of poor diet, lifestyle, driving, sports, over-the-counter drugs, alcohol etc.

Yes, and yes. It is my contention that if the risks were communicated clearly and credibly that there would be less resistance.

>Nowhere are they designed to provide lots of spurious vaccinations for profit.

Just a bunch of hard-workin' honest folks trying to make a living. Got it. Want to buy some property? I don't have to prove that people in the pharmaceutical industry aren't immune from human nature.

>Your allegations that trials are "rigged" is without basis.

Trials are rigged, improperly designed if you want to be charitable. http://www.badscience.net/books/bad-pharma/

Read the book, or don't. If you claim there is nothing wrong with the state of the relationship of the pharmaceutical industry / FDA / EMEA you are either a liar or a fool.

Tamiflu (not a vaccine but it shows a drug company's willingness to hide inconvenient data from scrutiny) "We found a high risk of publication and reporting biases in the trial programme of oseltamivir. Sub-population analyses of the influenza infected population in the oseltamivir trial programme are not possible because the two arms are non-comparable due to oseltamivir's apparent interference with antibody production. The evidence supports a direct oseltamivir mechanism of action on symptoms but we are unable to draw conclusions about its effect on complications or transmission. We expect full clinical study reports containing study protocol, reporting analysis plan, statistical analysis plan and individual patient data to clarify outstanding issues. These full clinical study reports are at present unavailable to us." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD008965...

Flu vaccine "The review showed that reliable evidence on influenza vaccines is thin but there is evidence of widespread manipulation of conclusions and spurious notoriety of the studies." [1][2] (both papers contain the same disclaimer)

Merck has allegedly lied for years about the efficacy of their MMR vaccine in order to retain exclusive license. https://www.courthousenews.com/2012/06/27/47851.htm

> -- there is no evidence of malice here on the part of GSK

No, of course not. A settlement was reached. No need to pursue the matter further.

>It is a silly criticism that the rewards are paid by the government rather than the company

No, it is not. It perverts the normal corrective economic forces of the marketplace. Under that system, a manufacturer has no real incentive to correct defects in its products or manufacturing processes. Only to hide them from scrutiny when they occur.

>, as the goal is to provide adequate care to people adversely affected by public health efforts,

Partly, the goal is to ensure that the US retains a manufacturing capability for a critical need (vaccines).

>not to discourage the development of vaccines by private industry.

I think you misunderstood.

>Unfortunately, it's difficult to find aggregated statistics on idiopathic autoimmune disorders.

Yes, it is quite difficult to find reliable information about lots of things to do with the pharmaceutical industry. That's part of the problem. It wouldn't mean anything if it were true. The existence of a few cheats, and a few honest but misguided fools does not constitute proof that everyone is a cheat or a fool.

>I suggest a class-action lawsuit against the producers of nothing on behalf of women.

You're a funny guy. I bet that kind of wit earns you lots of respect.

>Because I don't need any more of a headache than you've already given me.

Well then go jump in a lake or something.

>66 serious events for 1,400,000 vaccinations, or a 1:21000 chance of serious adverse events. If all of those cases happen to the 1/3 of people who are "predisposed" to Lyme arthritis, their risk is really 1:7000, slightly lower than their 1:6500 risk caused by... nothing. And that's only for disorders arising in the same year as the vaccination.

Isn't LYMErix a series of three shots? The abstract said 1,400,000 doses were distributed. Does distributed == administered? Still though, you've been generous enough with the risk odds. 1:7000 is roughly on par with the chance I'll be seriously injured in a car accident. Do I wear seatbelts, yes. Do I choose carefully when and where I drive? Yes. In which case, why shouldn't I also carefully consider whether or not to take a vaccination, especially if efficacy is in question, or if I have low risk of contracting the disease it is supposed to protect me from?

>And this very low incidence rate

It's a pretty average incident rate, isn't it?

> is exactly what we expect to see after a vaccine has passed a properly formulated clinical trial.

So? It's also what we'd expect to see after a bad vaccine has passed a rigged ^H^H poorly designed clinical trial. It is a serious problem that failed trials can be run again and again until favorable results are obtained. Nothing prevents this from happening.

Fun fact about VAERS, reporting is voluntary and open to anyone, on the one hand filled with (sometimes garbage) from laypersons, and on the other underreported to by professionals.

>If your argument consists of denying the conclusions of scientific studies outright without any further analysis,

My argument is that it is practically impossible for a layperson to make an informed decision. If one takes a pessimistic view of pharmaceutical industry behavior and a conservative approach to risk management, one can arrive at a reasonable suspicion that all things vaccine-related aren't up to snuff. It is in the public interest for full disclosure of drug trial data and adverse event data to be made.

>>Specifically, judgments about whether the vaccine was truly responsible for an adverse event cannot be made from VAERS reports.

>So the CDC is here... to back me up. Did you even look at the Google results?

So does that mean that there are never any real adverse events? That would be great news! You pick your favorite result, I'll pick mine.

>You do of course have to keep these numbers in perspective. VAPP remains rarer than terrorism.

Yes, it is rare, but no, VAPP (1 in 2.4M?) is much more common than terrorism(1 in 10M?).

>A gross misrepresentation of life in developing countries, of the meaning of the term "immunodeficiency", and the causes of immunodeficiency.

Malnutrition cannot cause immunodeficiency? You should write a paper. You'll be famous.

> The misinformation

There is no misinformation. I have been in error, so have you there is a difference. Your persistent insistence that I am some kind dishonest crazed anti-vaccine crusader is ridiculous. You're the one who seems to be foaming at the mouth.

> you attempt to spread is dangerous,

What is dangerous is the erosion of peoples' confidence in medicine (lost your herd immunity, see how that happened?), and the fact that nobody from that profession can seem to muster an acceptable explanation for often simple things. You keep thinking that condescention will somehow bring people around.

>people have the collective right to be informed that your arguments are weak and your conclusions incorrect.

Sure, here it is. Let them read this glorious thread.

>It is in the interest of people reading this to see your claims debunked,

Which claims are debunked? So I had a mistaken understanding of the way vaccine court operates in some cases, a fact which was pointed out and acknowledged a day ago. You win!

Have you shown that pharmaceutical company malfeasance is nonexistent?

Greed and negligence are miraculously absent from pharmaceutical company staff?

Have you shown that vaccines never injure anyone?

Have you shown that vaccine injury prevalence is outside the range of normal harms we subject ourselves to?

Have you shown that vaccines are always effective?

Have you shown that there is a just/reliable/fair remedy for harms from vaccine injury?

> I have attempted to do so in a clear and scientifically accurate manner.

So far I'm only convinced of the outstanding magnitude of your charm.

>My intent is to expose you.

Well here I am. A guy who reads the labels of things before he lets people jab him or his kids. Sometimes, I even decide the vaccine isn't necessary, or worth the risk (gasp!), even though I am aware of the fact that I don't have enough data to make a proper informed decision. In the absence of data, I often plan for the worst reasonable case. I'm aware that I may be a little bit too skeptical. That's too bad. If you find that prospect terrifying for you or your children, then I advise you to find a better way to communicate, or find a way to make all of the data that one needs for a proper decision available. I advise everyone else who gives a crap to do the same.

[1] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD004879... [2] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD001269...

⬐ scythe

Okay. I win. I win because this post is entirely off-topic. You wrote not one word about LYMErix, because you haven't got any further serious contributions. This is so riddled with errors I don't know how to respond in a serious manner.

Yes, sometimes you decide that vaccines aren't worth the risk. You do it because you are irrational and paranoid. You ask me that, in order to demonstrate that the LYMErix trials were not "rigged", that pharmaceutical companies must be shown to be the second coming of Jesus Christ. It's absurd, and what's more absurd is that you go on to casually dismiss all of the relevant data on the basis of a book collating instances of problems in the medical industry. The specific fallacy is ad hominem: my adversary is a jerk, so don't believe him. The influenza trial you mention? I didn't respond because that quote you've pointed out twice now relates to efficacy, not safety. We were talking about vaccine safety, and frankly I don't have time to embark on a wide-ranging analysis of the medical industry. If you continue to poison your own well by reading only books written for a popular audience with titles like "Bad Pharma", you will of course be misled repeatedly into this sort of recondite discourse and you will be woefully uninformed and unprepared for it. So you have so far doubted every study that disagrees with you on frivolous grounds, and you blindly accept any piece of information that supports your position -- the book, the one influenza vaccine study you're so fond of, etc -- and none of these is deserving of such unflappable sycophancy by someone who claims to care about intellectual honesty. The thing is, if you were really concerned about the truth, I shouldn't have to explain this to you.

You repeatedly pretend the various mistakes you've made are unimportant to the point, even though basically all of the claims in your original post have been discredited. In this new post of yours, you do it again: pharmaceutical companies will not even in a fantasy nightmare scenario suppress information about idiopathic problems, because "idiopathic" means without any determinable cause. The chance of being injured in a car accident likewise is after wearing a seatbelt, and yet you consider this a remedy. All available evidence says that the LYMErix trials were gonest, and you call them rigged. Furthermore, your apparent belief that a "starving waif in some developing country" is at a high risk for malnutrition-induced immunodeficiency is outrageous. While immunocompromise appears in extreme cases of malnutrition, this is rare even in LDCs and the vast majority of immunodeficiency cases of any relevance are linked to diseases and genetic disorders. This is in addition to your misrepresentation of Japanese vaccine scheduling, your misrepresentation of the history and use of OPV, and your misunderstanding of vaccine court, this last point having been central to your original argument. Your misinformed opinion is so asinine it affects my application of Hanlon's razor, and furthermore: everything I have posted has been true, and where approximations have been used they have been clearly marked alongside the relevant reasons for applying them. Your assertion that our arguing techniques have been in any way comparable is laughable.

This is in addition to the fact that your responses to my arguments have been terrible; you wish to characterize my opening comparison as absurd when even in a previous post you had acknowledged it as reasonable: how else am I to interpret your claim that vaccine risk is fundamentally more avoidable than lightning, which was at least close enough to the mark to be amusing, but now it is merely sad.

The repeated insults you have delivered over the course of this thread have been without provocation. I have been harsh, but in every case I have been careful to address your argument, not you, and you have justified it by the paucity of honesty on display. Whether you want to believe it or not, the misinformation on display in your posts is exactly the sort of selective attention and scaremongering that is damaging public-health efforts across the globe.

You are a dangerous, blithering idiot, and I bid you good day.

http://foaas.com/linus/fnordfnordfnord/scythe

Some of these seems to be outright lies (like implicitly labeling X axis for different data points) but other techniques are just well crafted data illusions and covered well in books such as How to Lie with Statistics http://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/039...

Weirdly enough the fact that this is a marketing campaign by Microsoft seems to be ignored when considering the numbers in the press release. There is also the curious omission of the percentage of people who found Bing to be “better” than Google.

Any reaction to Bing could have been a result of people being exposed to it for the first time not necessarily it being the “better” option. It also could be that people are having a positive impression simply because it’s not as bad as they imagined it would be, as indicated by this claim: “64% of people were surprised by the quality of Bing’s web search results.”.

Also there is the matter of the ridiculous disclaimer about the features being omitted in the side-by-side as if they aren't integral to the search experience, not to mention that seemingly all queries to Google appear to be originating from Seattle which degrades the quality of local queries by user located elsewhere.

On a related note I recommend reading the How to lie with statistics book, it's required reading especially when outlets copy/paste press releases: http://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/039...

How to Lie With Statistics

http://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/039...

The infographic being criticized in the article, an infographic trying to make a point about a public policy position, may not have used the most meaningful fact in the first place. If the issue is cost of imprisonment per inmate per year, then the correct comparison is to the spending per full-time student per year, which at Princeton and several other universities is higher than the billed full list price tuition, because Princeton has other sources of revenue besides tuition.

Spending per full-time student figures are collected by the United States federal government, by law, and are reported on the College Results website maintained by a nonprofit organization.

http://www.collegeresults.org/search1b.aspx?institutionid=18...

AFTER EDIT: While doing other things away from my computer, I thought about how the submitted article relates to the culture aspired to here on Hacker News. In February 2009, Paul Graham wrote an article "What I've Learned from Hacker News"

http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html

looking back on the first two years of Hacker News. He wrote then, "There are two major types of problems a site like Hacker News needs to avoid: bad stories and bad comments." He thought at that time that the steps Hacker News takes to keep out bad stories have been largely successful, and to this date there haven't been any big technical changes (certainly never downvotes on submissions) to screen out bad stories. The author of the submitted article says, "Think before you link" in her example of an infographic about the problem described in the article, and goes on to say, "So before you pick up that infographic, give it a good, hard look." This is the desired culture here on HN. Early in my 1132 days of participation here on HN, I asked more experienced participants if the expectation here is that links are submitted for comment, even if the submitter disagrees with the link, or if submitting a link is an implicit endorsement that the link has at least minimal quality. The participants who kindly replied to my question overwhelmingly said that I and participants here in general should just submit links that they endorse as worth a read, not crap links to stir up comments of disagreement. I agree with the author of the submitted link here that infographics are too eye-catching and resist efforts at fact-checking, and that is is worthwhile to check the underlying sources and facts before passing on a link to an infographic. Way back in 1954 the author of How to Lie with Statistics

http://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/039...

pointed out that some lies about statistics are most easily performed with display graphics. Readers have to be on the lookout for such issues.

Two great books for those who need to re/freshen up their statistics:

http://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/039...

http://www.amazon.com/Cartoon-Guide-Statistics-Larry-Gonick/...

I haven't had a chance to check out the manga guide to statistics but that might be a decent introduction, as well.

How to Lie with Statistics (http://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/039...) is a short, enjoyable read. It doesn't tell you how to do statistics, but it gives some warning about common problems.